After Your “Daddy Days” End

What’s not to like about paternityleave? So-called “daddy days” offer precious time to bond with a new baby, cement new household routines, and lay the foundation of a family’s life.

But what happens when paternity leave ends? Dad returns to a workplace where the norm of the ideal worker is one who is dedicated, unencumbered, and happy to work long, inflexible hours. And often the family defaults to an arrangement where mom shoulders the baby’s needs – especially if she’s still at home – despite dad’s effort during paternity leave. Because all-or-nothing workplace cultures prevail, mothers often end up feeling like single parents, an outcome rarely acknowledged. Further, those long work hours for fathers sometimes push mothers out of their jobs in the paid labor force. And even if mom hangs in there, she faces the real threat of overload or becoming maxed out by the second shift of housework and child care, and the third shift of tending to family emotional needs and her own mental task of holding everything together. To make matters worse, a man who doesn’t dig deeply into his new role of father, as much as his wife expected, can expect her to love him a little less.

What to do, then, to prevent new parents from reverting to ingrained, gendered behavior patterns, replete with disappointment, exhaustion, derailed careers, and worse? One solution is for dads to make use of flexible work options offered by employers, so they can continue providing their families daddy hours after daddy days end.

A recent survey of 866 adults by Harris Interactive for Mom Corps (a talent acquisition firm) found two-thirds reporting their companies would accommodate a request for a flexible work schedule to take care of kids, or for other reasons. In fact, more men than women (50 versus 44 percent) said they would consider flex work options (flexible hours, part-time, contract work) instead of a full-time, traditional-hours job, in order to better achieve their needed and desired work-life fit. More than two-thirds of the men included flexibility in their list of “most important” considerations when looking for a new job and deciding where to work. Indeed, 43 percent of them considered quitting or had quit a job because it wasn’t flexible enough. Another study shows the idea of working flexibly to create work-life balance gaining in popularity – so much so that even male senior executives in Fortune 500 companies said they would forgo pay for it. There are like-minded men at the other end of the career spectrum, too, as I found doing research for The Custom-Fit Workplace, young men searching for their first jobs and still only anticipating fatherhood, but including hours flexibility and paternity leave in the job attributes they consider necessary.

It has long been the case that workers hesitated to ask for flexible options, because they felt it would hurt their chances of advancing in a workplace. There’s good news, though, on this front. Research by Alison Konrad and Yang Yang, published in the Journal of Organizational Behavior and honored with the 2013 Kanter Award, finds that people who use flexible work options are promoted more than others. This result surprised even the authors, given prior research. Various studies have shown that parents who signal their need for family-friendly accommodations (such as flexible work hours, shifted schedules, and parental leave) are stigmatized, with implications for their raises, bonuses, and promotions. Konrad and Yang conclude, however, that “the ongoing positive effects of conservation of time and energy resources for employees outweigh the initial short-term negative effects of signaling and stigmatization.” They believe the flexible work options facilitate a productive process whereby people with lower stress and richer home lives perform better at work. (Indeed, a large body of research shows that using work-flex enhances job motivation and performance.) They also suggested a possible correlation between people who signal their need for flexibility and people with higher promotability: both might stem from underlying, desirable strengths in taking initiative, self-management, and commitment to getting work done well.

With the daddy hours provided by flexible working, new families can continue molding the structure and roles that parental leave initially made possible. Fathers can spend meaningful time parenting their children over the long haul of nearly two decades, not just a few days or weeks bonding with them as infants.

Flexible work arrangements offer another benefit, too, according to economist Claudia Goldin. In her presidential address recently to the American Economic Association, she pointed to its potential to close the pay gap between men and women. Her extensive research shows that while the last century saw “a grand gender convergence” – with the differences between men and women narrowing in labor force participation, paid hours of work, hours of work at home, life-time labor force experience, occupations, college education, and earnings – that convergence process has lately stalled. Since the 1990s, research has found no closing of the gender pay gap, even when considering workers of the same occupation and age. Why? Goldin’s research shows that “hours of work in many occupations are worth more when given at particular moments and the hours are more continuous.” Goldin proposes that employers stop disproportionately rewarding people who work particular continuous segments of time. Instead, if total hours worked are the same, pay the same. She sees some progress toward this goal in some industries—science, technology, health care—but asks for more, challenging the private sector to offer flexible work hours free of wage penalties to both mothers and fathers patching together a real presence in their children’s lives.

After all, when mothers earn more, pressure lifts from fathers to replace those lost wages by working during what could be daddy hours. Bigger paychecks for wives give husbands more power to choose jobs and careers that offer flexibility. If dads use more hours to care for those they care about, they can demolish outdated norms of masculinity and work-flex stigmas – and get more hugs at home. Everyone wins.

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